Critics hate "Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen." But the public loves it. Why is there a disconnect?
I was recently participating in a discussion on Fark.com about why films like Transformers 2 and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince can be box-office successes despite their lack of critical support. Many critics have been posting up commentaries on how sad it is that Americans don’t listen to critics anymore, and how we’re going to get a continued glut of bad movies every summer because movegoers are so “gee whiz wow” amazed at things blowing up and aren’t interested in films that are actually, well, good.
I thought about this disconnect for awhile, and it occurred to me that there’s a good reason that moviegoers aren’t listening to the critics. There was a time when critics offered a valuable service to people who went to the movies as a form of weekly entertainment. But things have changed; movie viewing has evolved, while critics have not. And many changes have occurred over the last decade or so to create the disconnect we’re seeing now.
Filmgoers don’t watch a lot of movies in the theater
Movie theaters are increasingly empty, and with good reason — the novelty of the experience has been offset by some very annoying trends. Ticket prices are high. Concessions are ridiculously overpriced. Films are preceded by noisy commercials for youth-oriented products. Parents tend to treat theaters as surrogate babysitters for their tween- and early teen-aged children. Said tweens and teens disrupt the films by talking loudly, texting, and moving around mid-feature. Other audience members are rude, too, coming in late, coughing loudly, or laughing inappropriately. Some theaters have regular problems with sound and picture quality. Some are too cold. Others are like furnaces. The list goes on.
It costs my wife and I around $20 to go to the theater. (We sneak in our own sodas and candy because, well, we just don’t feel bad about not paying for grossly overpriced concessions.) For a family of 4, that’s going to be $35-40. That’s an awful lot of money to spend for two hours of entertainment, especially when you can get the DVD from a Red Box for $1 if you’re willing to wait… but we’ll tackle that point in a moment.
And what do you get for your money? Generally, a film that isn’t that much better on the big screen than it is at home. So you don’t got to the movies for the quality of the film — you go for the spectacle. It’s much more fun to see special effects films on the big screen. This has been true for several years, and it’s going to be even more obvious as more 3D films are released. If you’re going to assault your senses with loud sound and giant imagery, you want to do it with something fantastic and colorful, like an action film or an animated feature. If you’ve got a family, it’s got to be something everyone’s going to enjoy. Like it or not, those stupid action films and dumb animated kid’s films are the most likely to appeal to the entire family.
Filmgoers watch “Good” movies on home systems
Home systems have really come a long way in the last ten years, and it’s possible now to get a beautiful setup for a few thousand dollars. It used to be a big investment, but HD TV has become common enough now that most families have one of a pretty reasonable size. HD TV and DVD players have really helped home systems gain a lot of ground in generating the “authentic” movie experience. You can buy a DVD for the price of one or two movie tickets, and you can rent them for a dollar from the Red Box or on an inexpensive plan through a service like Netflix.
And thus, families often reserve the watching of “good” movies for their home systems, where they can cheaply and conveniently watch two or three films in an evening, with the ability to stop in the middle for a bathroom or snack break, to rewind if something important is missed, or to fast forward if a film is getting too boring. It’s a much more intimate and fun way to watch a movie, and it’s a lot cheaper, too. And, since it’s so much easier than going to the theater, families have the option to watch a lot of movies they wouldn’t normally view, or which might be too boring for a family outing, but interesting to one or two members of the family.
Filmgoers are influenced by social pressures and marketing
Often, I go to the movies not because I want to, but because someone else wants to. Sometimes, that results in my seeing a film I’m not particularly interested in seeing. There’s a huge social element to moviegoing (which is ironic, given the fact that you sit there quietly and don’t talk during the film), and it plays a big role in ticket sales. For many people, going to the movies is just something to do with their friends, families or dates; it’s not a big deal to them.
There’s also an element of marketing at play. Big movies are often heavily marketed, and even if they’re not good, people will go see them simply because they’ve heard of them. You see this a lot during the first few months of the year, when fairly bad films are released, but have fairly big openings simply because they’ve been marketed properly. The critics hate them, but it doesn’t matter; the marketing messages are much more appealing to the target audiences than anything the critics have to say, and besides — these films are usually released when there’s very little else to watch. And again, it’s something to do — moviegoers are more concerned about the experience than the content.
Now that we’ve looked at how movivegoers have changed, let’s look at the critics.
Critics see everything, and that’s not a good thing.
Critics are generally paid to watch all of the films that are released in a given week, not just one or two. They’re given special screenings of these films, sometimes in advance, and they can come into a film in a bad mood because they just saw a really good film right before it. They are prone to bias, and they often prefer certain genres of film over others.
I used to watch Siskel & Ebert and found that Gene Siskel’s tastes were much more in line with my own than Roger Ebert’s. I like Roger Ebert, and I think he’s a fantastic writer and film critic. But I only agree with his opinions about half of the time. And that tends to be the problem when you evaluate any critic who is reviewing a film outside his or her preferred genre; you might only watch horror films, but they’ve seen everything, and they’re going to compare your favorite genre to other films in general when they rate, and not to other films in the genre.
I knew a film reviewer for my college paper back in the late 1990s who saw Bride of Chucky and gave it a positive review. He was clearly not a professional critic, because his opinion was far outside the critical mainstream. But was his opinion any less valid? Certainly not. He just hadn’t been required to see every other film that week. And he happened to like bad films because he found them ironic.
Critics are often educated about cinema, while the public is not.
This is probably one of the biggest areas of disconnect. Critics often talk about producers, directors, cinematographers, screenwriters, and other creative people from behind the camera when they review films. They talk about storytelling structure, photographic techniques, and mise en scene. This is of litle value to the average filmgoer, who doesn’t know much about any of these elements. A film critic can appreciate the clever subtlety of an art film, because he or she knows enough about cinema to be in on the mechanics of filmmaking. The public will miss it entirely, because the public does not know how to appreciate cinema as an art form. As is true with most creative media, the public is more likely to search for personal meaning in a film than to try to understand what the creative team was trying to say.
Critics just don’t seem to get this. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be bewildered.
Critics don’t understand marketing
Good critics tend to insulate themselves from the hype. Roger Ebert, for example, refuses to watch film trailers. That’s a good practice. It keeps one objective.
But the public is constantly being bombarded with advertising messages and hype. These things shape their opinions and make big films sound more interesting to them. Did most people really enjoy Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End? I don’t think so. It was a nonsensical mess. But that film was so heavily marketed, Johnny Depp was an attraction, and the Keith Richards appearance so heavily discussed, that people flocked to it anyhow because it was familiar and sounded fun. Their opinions of the film were already shaped by marketing and by past experience.
Critics miss all of this. They often have disdain for the marketing, and complain that it tarnishes the films by making messages out of catchphrases. When they insulate themselves from it, they misunderstand why people are going to see films. And when they criticize it, they essentially tell the public that they are stupid for buying into the hype. And that, unfortunately, creates yet another disconnect, causing the public to believe that critics are not respectful of those who aren’t just like them.
So, simply put, critics do not watch films like the average person does; they watch films like critics do. That’s what’s causing this disconnect, and that’s what’s making critics irrelevant. Sadly, critics do serve an important function in helping to guide and shape the aesthetics of the audience so that people can properly digest what they’ve seen. But with critics so focused on consumer reviews, they’re really missing an opportunity to elevate the discourse… and instead simply alienating the people they believe they’re writing for.
Sound Off | SeanJJordan | 
December 26, 2009 11:01 pm | 
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